25/05/2026
A random thought for the day using AI. With so many blogs and thoughts about Run Geordie Run online, I often ask ChatGPT for an opinion. Few responses feel sincere or remotely accurate but today’s was pretty good. My prompt was “Why is being able to visualise the route across the USA both a gift and a curse?”
and the response…
“Being able to visualise a route across the USA is a gift because it turns something impossibly huge into something emotionally real. You can see the deserts before you reach them. You can imagine the tiny towns, the state line signs, the long straight highways disappearing into heat haze. The route becomes more than mileage — it becomes a story unfolding in your head before your feet even arrive there.
For someone like Run Geordie Run, that vision can pull you forward on the hard days. You’re not just running down another anonymous road — you’re chasing the next chapter. Monument Valley means something. The Rockies mean something. The Pacific means something. Visualisation creates purpose, anticipation and momentum.
But it’s also a curse because the mind doesn’t only visualise triumph — it visualises distance.
You can stand at the beginning and see thousands of miles stacked in front of you. Every mountain range. Every hostile weather front. Every lonely stretch of highway. The sheer scale can become mentally crushing because your brain keeps zooming out instead of staying with today’s miles.
A normal run asks:
“Can I get through today?”
A trans-USA run sometimes asks:
“Can I survive all of this?”
That’s a dangerous weight to carry every morning.
Visualisation can also romanticise the journey. In your imagination, America becomes cinematic — sunsets, Forrest Gump roads, epic moments of revelation. Reality, meanwhile, is often blisters, crosswinds, exhaustion, roadside debris, empty roads and the same pair of battered legs waking up sore again.
So the gift is inspiration.
The curse is awareness.
Because once you can truly picture the scale of the challenge, you realise you are attempting something so enormous that the only way to conquer it is to stop looking at the whole map and return to the next step, the next mile marker, the next sunrise.
The paradox of crossing America is this:
You need the vision big enough to begin…
but small enough to survive.”
I really like those final 2 lines. What are your thoughts?
